Check out this Spielberg quote for a sad admission that it's all about the money: "I just want to hear one number, which is the Monday-morning number" (http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0242026).
It's fine if the filmmakers want to ruin their brand, but the insulting thing is that they think the audience is too dumb to notice. I haven't seen Speed Racer but from the trailers I can tell that the Wachowskis are at least making an effort on some level.

This a cheap film without cheap thrills; and when I say cheap film, I mean poor on every level except the business level (budget: ~$185 mil). Indiana Jones 4 is churned out by people who pride themselves on high production values, yet is ridden with poor cinematography, poor VFX, poor acting,...

It makes sense that a Japanese director was responsible for this. I'll look forward to more of the same in Mr. Sekiguchi's Survive Style 5 (http://ss5.goo.ne.jp/) sometime.
There's so much interesting work being done in music vids. It's too bad that so little of it carries over to feature films at the moment.

Directed by Gen Sekiguchi at Tugboat Tokyo (I think that's the production arm of Dentsu, or it used to be). Genius. (If you are like me then you will be outraged to learn that there is a torrent of Gen Sekiguchi's feature, Survive Style 5+ available. Despicable.) Link to downloadable .mpg...

The filmmakers have been to play up the "controversial" angle, in the hope that bad publicity will be good publicity (but they don't seem to be mentioning that Alan Moore, the original author, disowned the film). It'll be interesting to see how it does on word of mouth. It got mostly good or so-so reviews, but then so did 'Phantom Menace'.

V for Vendetta, based on the iconic 1980s comic of the same name, is set in a semi-totalitarian Britain of the near future. The masked renegade V (Hugo Weaving) singlehandedly tries to topple the government. Power has been seized through deception and manipulation. We're tempted to yawn: so wha...

Mr. Dennis modestly calls his stuff "skills to pay the bills". I think it's a good example of how you can be a commercial artist and still maintain integrity in your work.
Also, there is a tendency for people who do digital montage to mute the colour and texture of their source material, but Dennis does the opposite, which is much harder.

It's nothing short of amazing that a Best Picture Golden Globe was awarded to this shallow and tedious film — the "gay cowboy movie". The question is not so much why Brokeback Mountain is so weak, but why it is doing so well despite being so weak. Amplified from a short story by E. Annie Proul...

"今からでも…" :: Haneda /Tokyo :: Canon EOS 20D / TS-E45mm F2.8 続きを読む A cool Japanese blog with loads of great tilt-shift lens photographs. They are the ones which don't seem to have the right perspective - they look like photographs of models. Link

The film's marketing people might be cynical enough to pretend that it is really about some major issue, in the hope of lucking an Oscar on principle. I'd say most people could safely do without seeing it.

It's nothing short of amazing that a Best Picture Golden Globe was awarded to this shallow and tedious film — the "gay cowboy movie". The question is not so much why Brokeback Mountain is so weak, but why it is doing so well despite being so weak. Amplified from a short story by E. Annie Proul...

The cunningly machine translated Chinese caption says the cameraphone is the 750i. If you machine translate it back to English it doesn't read as well:
"These were I recently uses 750i the telephone photographic camera in India, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, patted with Indonesia some photographs. Hopes you is sure to to like."
By the way, the photos are easily good enough to sell the phone. One step closer to a world where everyone gets their 15 gigabytes of fame.